Menu
© 2026 The Couch Critic
Browse 196 movies from Le Fresnoy
After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many people in Russia faced a brutal choice: prison, the army – or exile. Margarita, Yuri and their friends are caught in the crosscurrents of history, with no way to return home, but also no place where they feel truly welcome.
Feb 2026
Moon travels through a mysterious unexplained world free of adults. Moon meets a scholar turned sage and her translator in a mountain hut, where she tries to understand what is happening, based on a play by Don DeLillo. She meets many others who perform for her, show her a film, give her gifts, show her different possibilities for living. She observes and moves on into an unknown future.
Jun 2026
Stranded along a sublime river fjord in northern Portugal, an ornithologist is subjected to a series of brutal and erotic Stations-of-the-Cross-style tests.
Sep 2016
In 2017, in Portugal, devastating wildfires destroyed forests and killed children and adults; some died in their villages, others were trapped on a road. Communication failed, and the villages had no shelters. The film’s action does not take place in 2017, but at a later time. It follows a small group of people who lost their dearest ones and are now in the process of learning how to live after everything they have lost.
Dec 2025
Mariel wants to play Isabella in Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure”. With the support of Luciana, who is also an actress, she has already rehearsed the part. But during the audition, Mariel realises that Luciana is trying out for the same role.
May 2021
Three siblings comprise the latest generation in a family of puppeteers led with passion by their father. They are magicians of a kind, but can barely make ends meet, working mainly for the love of their craft. Their grandmother contributes too, not only as a seamstress but also as a repository of memories and wisdom. A tragic event will challenge the desire of each sibling to carry on.
Mar 2023
After a bad breakup, a college-aged Parisian moves into her father's flat only to discover that he is living with his new girlfriend - a young woman her age.
May 2017
Island of La Réunion, in the beginning of the 20th century. Five teenagers commit a savage crime. As punishment, a Dutch captain takes them to a supernatural island with luxuriant vegetation and bewitching powers.
Jun 2017
This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for export. The workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, chiefly from the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu.
Nov 2023
André Demester secretly and painfully loves Barbe, his childhood friend, accepting from her the little that she gives him. He leaves home to be a soldier in a war in a far off land. Barbarity, camaraderie and fear turn him into a warrior. As the seasons go by, Barbe, alone and wasting away, waits for the soldiers to return. Will Demester’s boundless love for Barbe save him?
Aug 2006
Invisible People is a multi-layered depiction of the unique Japanese contemporary dance Butoh that flows between revolt, eroticism, trance, prayer, ancestral experience, and physical anonymity. The film gradually drifts away from its core issue and becomes a general portrayal of life itself, with all its unforeseen strokes of fate and strange micro-connections.
Oct 2025
Akerman spends a month in Tel Aviv, in an apartment by the sea, contemplating childhood, family, and her Jewish identity.
Feb 2006
At the close of the eyelashes, emerging beneath awakening and radiance: this is the first glance. In this inner eye runs the dream of a lively youth, girl and boy, a promise. It is the first impulse, so that the first steps may be taken outside: the desire to flee and frolic. Before the foreign eye, animal, human, or divine, there is deep within us the inexorable perception of self, which our own creature always advances, haloed.
Dec 2021
Wang Xilin, 86, is one of China's most important modern classical composers. During the Cultural Revolution he was the target of severe persecution, enduring beatings, imprisonment and torture. With excerpts from his Symphonies, he revisits for this film some of the horrifying events that still live on in his memory as testimony to an era that saw the dehumanization of the entire Chinese nation.
May 2023
“RAPTURE II - PORTAL" revolves around Ukrainian Vogue dancer Marko and the confrontation with his abandoned apartment in the region of Donbas, where the war is going on for ten years. It fuses the idea of a physical lost home and the body of a dancer as an infinite eternal home. The film is contextualized by the self-commented tour of Marko, structured as a hypnosis session.
Nov 2024
A young woman wandering around meets a young man going to a casting call for a pornographic film.
Oct 2002
A home-guard serviceman assigned the task of standing watch over a barren no-man's-land begins to experience an existential crisis after years of lonely service.
May 2005
The odyssey of Senegalese friends who attempt a life-threatening boat crossing.
Jun 2009
IVUL is the extraordinary story of Alex (Jacob Auzanneau), a young man who climbs on to the roof of his house and refuses to ever come back down to earth. His actions devastate his beloved family and we watch as their world falls apart. A dark and mysterious gardener (Tchili from This Filthy Earth) keeps watch over the family but is powerless to exorcise the curse that he feels has befallen them. Meanwhile the twin sisters (Manon and Capucine) provide light but sometimes macabre relief. The world of IVUL is a world of both fairytale and nightmare with the family manor house and forest landscape providing a compelling backdrop to the story.
Jan 2010
Jan 2026